How Well Can English Speakers Read French? (without learning it!)
Looking for precise and professional language translation? Look no further! I specialize in accurately translating English to Haitian Creole, French, and Spanish.
Trust me to deliver exceptional results that capture the essence of your message. Contact me today for flawless language translations.
Learn any language with professional tutors and native speakers on LiveXP & use these discounts:
▶Get your first $0.99 trial lesson by following the link:
▶Add promocode LANGFOCUS at the checkout to get 30% off a monthly or quarterly subscription
In this video I talk to native speakers of English and see how well they can read French – with absolutely no background in French. The results are quite interesting!
I also made sure they had little or no background with Romance languages other than French, so we could really see how well they do based only on their knowledge of English.
Special thanks to Cole, Luke, and Samuel for taking part in this video!
And thanks to all of you patrons for making Langfocus possible:
Aleksei Bogatov
AmateurTextualCriticism
Atlasino Fuyusaka
Bennett Seacrist
Bill Walderman
Brian King
Bruce C
Chris Meredith
Chuck Davis
Claudia Ramos
Fiona de Visser
Georgina Toland
Irina Bruce
Italy Made Easy
Jacob Madsen
John Moffat
Karl-Erik Wångstedt
Kirk Kirkpatrick
M. Aizat A. Rahman
Michael Cuomo
Michael J Synnott
Mody
Nobbi Lampe-Strang
Rosalind Resnick
Ruben Sanchez Jr
ShadowCrossZero
Ulf Hermjakob
Vincent David
Walter A Moore
Wolfgang Egon Schroder
Abdullah Al-Kazaz
Adam Vanderpluym
Aitona
Al
Alana Kalinowski
Alex Tsigdinos
Ali Muhammed Alshehri
Alice
Amittai Aviram
Andrew Woods
Anthony Peter Swallow
Aous Mansouri
Ashley Dierolf
Bartosz Czarnotta
Ben
Benjamin Tipton
Brent Warner
Bruce Ian Danton
Bruce Stark
Carl Luca Hofmann
chris brown
Chris Shifman
contumaciousCulimancer
Cyrus Shahrivar
Dan Haworth
Darek
David Golub
Desmond Drew
Diana Fulger
Diane Young
Dina Trageser
Donald Tilley
Doug
Edward Wilson
El Capitan Nico
Elijah Double
Eliza McCoole
Emilia Bruns
Eric Loewenthal
fatimahl
frederick shiels
G Bot
grace
Gregory Ferree
Grégoire Le Corre
Guillaume Brodar
Henrik Flyvbjerg
Herr K
Howard Clark
Hugh AULT
Ina Mwanda
James and Amanda Soderling
James Lillis
JAMES ORR
James Wraith
Jay Bernard
Jim McLaughlin
JL Bumgarner
John Gavin
John Weiss
Jonathan Hutchins
Julie Sriken
Kate Jensen
Konrad
Konstantin Bredyuk
KW
Laterunner
Laura Morland
Leah Meredith
Lee Dedmon
Leo Barudi
Lissette Talledo
Malandro
Manuel Rosales
Margaret Langendorf
Mark
Mark Judge
Mark Kemp
Martin Blackwell
Merrick Bobb
Merrick Bobb
Michael Mersol-Barg
Michael Regal
MikAE
Mike Frysinger
Mohammed A. Abahussain
Molly Fivian
Nicholas Gentry
Nicolas Elsishans
Niro
Oleksandr Ivanov
Patriot Nurse
Paul Shutler
Peter Nikitin
Peter Scollar
Phil Franks
piero
Piri JAKAB VON SZENGELICE
Ploshtinska polyudnica
Raymond Thomas
Roger Smith
Roland Seuhs
Ronald Brady
Rosetta Stephens
Scarecrow Repair
Sebastian Bartels
SJWS
Stefan Reichenberger
Taco de Jonge
Tara Pride
Theophagous
Thomas Chapel
Thomas Gijsbers
tomas o dathail
Tony DeSantis
Trevor Helminski
Vinicius Marchezini
Warren McKenzie
William MacKenzie
William O Beeman
Yagub Alserkal
Yeshar Hadi
Yuriy Vrublevskiy
Yuval Filmus
Éric Martin
Creative Commons images in this video:
Man of England under Norman rule
Author: XrysD
License: CC BY SA 4.0 International license
Learn any language with professional tutors and native speakers on LiveXP & use these discounts:
▶Get your first $0.99 trial lesson by following the link: https://livexp.biz/langfocus99
▶Add promocode LANGFOCUS at the checkout to get 30% off a monthly or quarterly subscription
The promocode is not working
@@rodrigomattioda12345 Thanks. I will inform LiveXP so they can check.
13:40 “Croissant”, the bread is not so-named because it rises like bread. It’s also the word “crescent”, because they have a slight crescent shape.
Canadians when watching this video: “Is that even worth asking?”
😂😂😂
Paul’s Canadian BTW
@@Samy-bu1ze Ah, c’est excellent, mon ami.
Yeah, I can read every cereal box in French, no problem!
Most Canadians don’t speak French. Aside from the native Francophones it’s really only a minority of Anglophones that live in or near Quebec.
Hello ! I love your videos Paul !
I’m a french speaker, I just would like to say, croissant (the pastry) is called like that because it has the shape of the crescent moon, the “growing” moon 🙂
I’m a French speaker myself and he got me confused with that one. Lol I always knew it to be “croissant de lune” the shape of the moon crescent.
Yes, some people have been saying that. I knew it was a form of croître, but didn’t know it came via the crescent moon. In that part of the video I was just making an impulsive comment, but thought it would interesting to put in the video.
No problem ^^ Thank you for your videos !
@@Langfocus I learned something though that I never paid attention to saying it in French : “croissant de lune” comes from the growing moon, “la lune qui CROÎT”. Never paid attention to that simple and evident truth while speaking. Feeling a little dumb in my own language. Loll
@@Langfocus IIRC, the most commonly cited origin of the croissant is that it was invented in Vienna (this kind of pastry is also called a Viennoiserie in French) to commemorate the siege of the town by the Ottomans in the 17th century, recalling the moon crescent displayed on Ottoman flags.
Having studied Spanish as a foreign language I can definitely say that you can understand about 80% of written French. That’s on average since the percentage would go higher when reading formal sentences. The true kryptonite when trying to understand French is its pronunciation, it just sounds so fast and monolithic you can’t distinguish the words and the places where they begin and end
@@Georgeirfx Good luck with the pronunciation! But English has its share of inconsistencies in pronunciation too… But yeah, we French speakers master the art of confusion. Lol
@@flonoiisana4647 I studied French at school and I can’t even imagine what a torture it was for the teachers to having their ears bleed almost every day. I started studying Spanish at an older age and was so pleased with its much simpler phonetics. English is also messed up a lot but I guess you get used to it faster due to the level of its ubiquity
Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire pour resoudre ce problème? (Keskong vafair pohaysoudrãs problem?) 😅
@@RogerRamos1993 loll
@@Georgeirfx Agree. I thought learning English was pretty smooth. I as a French speaker understand the apparent nonsense of French when it comes to pronunciation. It’s just that they kind of kept the old spelling for words that are pronounced completely differently centuries later.
Very nice video Paul, as a native french speaker I’m surprised to see how much of french english speakers can understand when written, by the way your level in french is really impressive ! Just one little thing, the pastry named “croissant” is not called this way because of the fact that it grows while being cooked, actually it’s called this way because of its shape which looks like a crescent moon, which is called “croissant de lune” in french, that’s why this pastry’s called “croissant” 🙂
Yeah, I knew it was related to croître in some way, but didn’t know about the “croissant de lune” route.
@@Langfocus But it is related to how the moon “raises” every day more and more. In astronomy there is a moon crescent and decrescent. Croître et décroître. So it is has the same meaning, but for an entirely different reason. That dates back to time immemorial, way before the pastry was invented. 🙂
He’s Canadian, he’s legally required to know some French 😉
In Argentina they call the crossaint a medioluna, literally meaning half moon. So the association with the moon checks out.
One interesting question is whether French speakers can liaisonize English effortlessly, whether they can switch on and off liaison at will? English speakers do liaisonize certain words: eg, “thank you” is pronounced as “thank kiew”, but if we were to apply liaison consistently, then “love you” would be “love view”, “for example” would be “for rex-xample”, etc. I wonder if French people can liaisonize all English words fluently and whether they can turn off liaison and speak French without liaison fluently.
Well done guys!
“Croissant” is about the shape of a moon crescent, not because it grows. It’s the moon that grows.
The French have the same difficulty as the English speakers: many words are very similar or the same but they have a very different meaning. A french person would simply pronounce french sentences with an English accent 😂
“Hello, I’m very content to encounter you. I adore to regard football, especially when they put the ball in the but.” (Just kidding, nobody’s that bad — right?)
What came first the growing moon or the growing dough. We may never know!
@@TheLifeHeLives-HeLivesToGod it’s the moon.. “croissant” was a phase of the moon with this shape long before the pastry.. in english it’s a “crescent”
@@oneeyejack2 Yes you are correct, that’s the point the moon was growing and so they called the shape “the growing moon”, Then the pastry was made in the same shape as the growing moon. The meaning does not change but the association in the mind of the language user has failed to recognize the ancient origin of the word. The moon grows and so does the dough of the pastry, the pastry can be shaped like a brick and it will still be called a croissant. Search: Etymology Crescent and see where the word came from.
Nobody’s that bad? Mais si, malheureusement, ça fait grincer les dents
Interestingly, Grippe used to be used in English as well for flu in the early 1900’s and before.
It’s actually the German word for flu.
Studying Spanish helped me immensely with the French. My guesses weren’t all correct but because of Spanish cognates I was close!
I understood “the grippe” only because I know it was used in English a long time ago – “the grip/grippe” – it was mentioned in a song in Guys and Dolls, the musical ^_^
Knowing French helps to learn new English vocabulary, but also it makes us no longer at ease with how to write French correctly. For instance, we have ‘rempart’ in French for ‘rampart’ in English with the same meaning. I used to write this word correctly as a kid, but now I feel like I need to check which one is French and which one is English whenever I come across the word.
You’re lucky you’re not Brazilian and haven’t learned Spanish.😅😂
I’m a native English speaker, semi-fluent in Spanish, with some academic exposure to French. Put all these together, and I was able to figure out about 80% of the words in, and meaning of, the sentences. Fun video!
Croissant is called that way because it resembles a waxing Moon, which is calling “crescent” (“growing”) for a reason.
16:18 He’s not wrong! French “grippe (noun) / gripper (verb)” and English “grip (verb)” actually share a common Germanic origin. In French, “gripper” means “grab, catch” or “block, stop due to friction”, so it’s not so far from its English cognate. Then, “grippe” meaning “flu” developed from this because of how the disease suddenly “grips” you like claws.
My school taught me to use ague for flu.
@@prenomnom2812 it’s “agripper” in French that means close to the same thing as “grip” in English.
I have seen “la grippe” in written English.
@@flonoiisana4647you guys are both right : “agripper” means “to grab” though “gripper” does mean “to block due to friction” (usually used in the past tense “grippé” to describe a botched mechanism for instance).
It’s also called „die Grippe“ in German. „Die“ (pronounced “dee”) is the German word “the” for feminine nouns. So it even has the same grammatical gender as the French, “la grippe”.
Hmm… makes me wonder if both don’t derive from a common Latin source word.
It definitely works the other way around too! Speaking a Romance language is such a cheatcode when learning English. Being a native French speaker gives me tons of advanced vocabulary almost without work — except for the pronunciation though, which even afters years remains tricky to me. Basic vocabulary is much harder though: I struggle with everyday Germanic words, which look really diverse and random to me since they are often unrelated to French and thus much harder to retain — even if they are the most useful ones! As a result, I’m better at naming ideas and concepts than habits and items, and I’m worse at talking with a child than writing an essay… But overall, Romance languages speakers still have a big, unfair advantage for being able to already know or easily guess half of English vocabulary with little to no effort nor memorisation… That’s why I truly pay an immense respect to all non-Romance and non-European students who _really_ have to learn English, _from zero!_
I get you! lol Fancy words in English are just common regurlary used French words to me. lol
Yeah, with Spanish it’s indirectly through the similarities with French, but I had a similar experience.
Another related thing: I often rely more on specific verbs than on phrasal verbs , and that is often perceived as “good”. But that’s just what’s easier for me.
I never realized until recently how difficult phrasal verbs can be for a non-native English speaker. I saw a friend’s ESL homework on the subject.
@@mikedaniel1771 Yeah, the basic stuff is alright, but then you have to be aware of things that change the meaning just by changing the place of the preposition, or stuff like that.
I can never think of good examples to explain what the issue is, but let me see: “put it up with that thing” and “put up with that thing” have very different meanings, right? Or “Go off” is one thing if it’s an alarm, a different one if it’s a bomb or a fire (and why does it go “off”?? it should go “on”, “up”, “boom”, anything but “off”), and “to go off on (someone)” yet another thing. And there are worse cases than those, lol.
@@mikedaniel1771 As an Italian native with a C1 certificate, I still try to desperately avoid them. Idc if I’m gonna sound formal, I’m not using too much of them. Recognizing them is an entirely different story though, I’ve gotten to the point where I associate meaning and form on the basis of “eh, it’s a feeling”, and that feeling’s right. But feeling’s not enough to nail the context, the right verb and its tiny word which the whole meaning depends on
The overlap in the French and English vocabularies is so great that if you spent like a day familiarizing yourself with the basics of French grammar – the articles, pronouns, how the tenses are generally formed, common forms of have and be, – that’s enough to enable you to read most text in French on the basic level. Sequel video idea?
Not true. All 4 of the “big” verbs (Etre, avoir, faire and aller) are different. throw in the conjugations and all the grammatical complexity and the only thing one could understand after a day are cognates. I doubt anyone with no training could even make a stab at understanding.
As a native French speaker this video was enlightening. So close to other languages and yet at the same time sounding so foreign. Keep up the good work. Your channel is amazing.
As someone whose first language was Armenian, then had English become their native language, as well as having taken 3 years of Latin in high school; most of this was fairly straightforward to me. One interesting thing to me was “grippe”, in Armenian we have the word “Գրիպ” (g’reep) which means sick, so there’s some connection there I didn’t know about. 😂
i m a native french and Arabic speaker… i learned English all by myself by watching TV…it was very easy for me since there are a lot of shared words (even if the pronunciation is different) and i learned Spanish too (since Spanish resemble french a lot and have also words from Arabic origin). thank you for this video 🙂 it was quiet interesting
Grippe is also grippe in German, griep in Dutch, gripp in Russian and grip in Bulgarian.
I grew up bilingual with German and French as my parents’ languages. Learning English vocab was a piece of cake for me, as I could find a French or German cognate for almost every word I encountered.